All this in a house on the border between Oakland and Berkeley, the sweet
liminal space where they could neither be stereotyped as
"crime-ridden" nor "hippie," "Black Panthers" nor "college kids."

Liminal space: that floating movement of a feather between hand
and ground, the trembling surface of water just before it boils, the held
breath of the world in the dusky moment between the death of night and the
break of day. To live in limerance is to live in a state of perpetual
suspension, working the stuff of life between your fingers in its raw
form just before it becomes concrete. Frank had lived in that state all
his life, Rosie reflected, expected to be loyal to two warring cultures
but rejected repeatedly by both. Neither wholly Chinese nor wholly
American, neither strictly monogamous nor single, neither gay nor
straight. He found himself in the "ands" and the "excepts," the cracks
where Others were told to slip. Marc knew it in his bones too, having been
plunged from female to male and passed through neither, been held in
"neither" for years by untrusting doctors. Rosie felt too sold, too
grounded in What Is. The image of Marc and Frank together flickered in
front of her; she felt drawn to their flame. She slowly began to recognize
the inbetween spaces in her own life: the anxious liquid of a custard slow
to jell; the solid liquid of yogurt held permanently between stages. Maybe
she could love this magical state herself, instead of clinging to the
determined security of normalcy. Maybe this could work out right, or
already had.